The project aims to conceptualize and empirically examine the capacity for governance of green and digital transition and their consequences for work and welfare.
The twins green and digital transition has profound implications for local communities, necessitating proactive governance to ensure a fair and equitable transformation. The research project Location of digital work and the green transition: new knowledge for the governance of big data centres (LOCATE) aims to conceptualize and empirically examine the capacity for governance of the twins green and digital transition and their consequences for work and welfare.
The project will contribute new knowledge on how big data centres affect the location of work and the social and environmental consequences for host municipalities in Norway and the UK. The cross-national comparison will provide new insights into the decision-making processes and negotiations among stakeholders involved in the planning of the data centres and the impact of the centres on employment and the environment.
LOCATE will contribute new knowledge about how changing multilevel and multistakeholder relations shape the governance of the twin transition. LOCATE will benefit from expertise in labour market research, social policy and human resource management.
LOCATE is finance throught OsloMet's strategic research area Green Transition.
Participants
More about the project
The twins digital and green transitions have profound implications for local communities, necessitating proactive and inclusive measures to ensure a fair and equitable transformation. Together, these twin transitions create opportunities for sustainable development but also pose challenges related to inequality, job security, and access to resources.
Public policies must address labour market disruptions, social inequalities, and regional disparities while fostering innovation and environmental sustainability. Understanding the mechanisms and processes that foster or hamper coordination will provide new knowledge to design appropriate policies for resource management and public welfare in Europe and globally.
Local governments in rural regions have high expectations to what the technology industry’s new, giant data centers can do to business activity and tax revenues for their region. However, the distribution of costs and benefits are uncertain and potentially uneven. LOCATE will provide new knowledge about the governance of these processes.
The long-term ambition is to provide new knowledge to improve the capacity for local, national and supranational governance of the twin transition. To achieve this, LOCATE will:
- collect and analyse data on big data centres in Norway, and compare with data from the UK
- prepare joint publications
- organize international workshops to further develop our global network of research partners and support our joint publication activities
- prepare applications for national and European research grants.
